Eumenius of Olonets

Holy Venerable Eumenius of Olonets is commemorated together with Eleazar and Nazarius, three monks linked to the Onega region of northern Russia. According to some sources they founded the monastery of Saint John the Forerunner on the island of Murma on Lake Onega. Old manuscripts sometimes call them Greeks, and for that reason they were taken to be disciples of Saint Lazarus of Murom, who came from Constantinople.

Historians think, however, that they lived later and did not know Lazarus directly. It is said that Eleazar and Nazarius founded the monastery of John the Forerunner in the Olonets district, but it does not appear in the sources before the seventeenth century. It is more likely that the three were monks of the men's monastery founded by Lazarus of Murom in honour of the Dormition of the Mother of God, on the Murom headland of Lake Onega, fifteen kilometres from the present village of Gakugsa in the Pudozh district of Karelia.

The Murom monastery is mentioned in the land registers from 1496 to 1678 or 1679 and then had three churches: of the Dormition of the Mother of God, of the Resurrection of Lazarus, and of the Nativity of Saint John the Forerunner. Towards the end of the sixteenth century the Dormition church burned, so in the seventeenth century the monastery could also be called that of the Forerunner: a boundary charter of 1650 from Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich mentions a gift by the Novgorod prince Vasily Ivanovich to the house of Saint John the Forerunner in the Murom monastery.

In 1786 the monastery was made a convent, and the following year it was closed. Monastic life returned in 1867, after a church of the Dormition had been built in 1866, with side chapels of the Nativity of the Forerunner and of Saint John of Rila. The old Forerunner church has not survived. The monastery was closed again in 1930 and reopened in 1991. Writings on the saints from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries say that their relics rested under the floor of the Murom monastery church, but the descriptions of the monastery say nothing of them.

Eumenius is commemorated on 11 July (new style), in the Synaxis of the Saints of Novgorod on a movable day, and the Greek tradition also commemorates the three on 4 June.